Maingear EPIC RUSH With Radeon R9 290X Crossfire

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Introduction and Specifications

Although the market for them is relatively small, we love to check out elaborate, no-holds-barred gaming PCs from time to time--you know, the kind of system that costs about the same amount as a serviceable used car. As fun as it is to check out an ultra high-end gaming rig, we also do it to gauge the user experience and to see just how much better it is (or isn't) versus a mainstream PC. But how great is the experience, really? The answer needs to be darn near perfection, because – let’s face it – a midrange gaming desktop is going to give you a pretty solid gaming experience (and look good doing it) without inflicting nearly the same damage to your wallet. Though the phrase “experience” has been driven to an industry cliché by PR types, it’s an apt description of what you’re looking for when you size up a top shelf, custom rig. It should be the computer you remember when you’re geeking out with your buddies years from now. With its $6k price tag, Maingear’s EPIC RUSH series is meant to do just that.

The EPIC RUSH oozes style and we’ll cover that on the next page, but for now, let’s take a look at the guts. You know what they say: no guts, no… high-end gaming performance.

Lifetime Angelic Service Labor & Phone Support with 3 year Comprehensive Warranty

Price:

$6,042

Intel’s Core i7-4770K is a popular processor for system builders these days. We’ve already seen the Haswell chip in systems from CyberPower, Digital Storm, and Falcon Northwest since it landed in June. The chip is cooled by an EK Supremacy water block that bears Maingear’s logo.

The liquid cooling system also handles the EPIC RUSH’s two AMD Radeon R9 290X video cards, which are some serious graphics beasts. As you’ll see, that CPU/GPU combo made for noteworthy performance in our benchmarks and really crushed recently-reviewed systems in a few of them.

Maingear opted for 16GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum memory in the form of four 4GB DIMMS, which max out the slots (though not the capacity) of the Asus Maximus VI Gene motherboard. On the storage side of things, the EPIC RUSH has as much capacity as you’re likely to need and then some: a striped array of two 250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSDs for keeping Windows 8.1 64-bit snappy, and a 4TB Seagate hard drive to store your games and whatnot. Interestingly, you could double your SSD space for another $442, which isn’t likely to be a deal-breaker if you’re shopping in this overall price range.

Powering this beast is a 1200-watt Corsair AX1200i power supply certified at 80 Plus Platinum (the second-highest 80 Plus rating). Our test system also included a Mad Catz Cyborg V5 keyboard and Logitech Gaming Mouse G500 that match the system’s paint job. That’s right: the keyboard and mouse are painted too.

Systems in this price range typically have solid warranties, and the EPIC RUSH certainly does: a two year comprehensive warranty is backed up by lifetime labor and phone support. Maingear is also running a deal right now in which it tacks an extra year onto the warranty for free. What makes Maingear’s tech support stand out is that the tech who built your system is usually the person to help you with troubleshooting, so he or she is very familiar with your particular PC.